Attracting custom, 99 years ago

[whole diary]

[grahame]

From the Wiltshire Times, December 1922



Could a similar marketing approach help rebuild passenger numbers next year?   Noting that 1.1.1923 was the date of the grouping when all the smaller railway companies were consolidated into the "Big 4", do we have a parallel opportunity now, nearly 100 years later, as things consolidate from a wide range of franchises into a single network under Great British Railways?

What difference to passenger numbers, the economy, and railway income would such a fare change have once (!!) we can easily travel again with Covid worries mitigated?  Would a one seventh reduction in fares result in a rise in income - perhaps by more than a seventh, helping use up spare capacity (and with one eye to moving that spare capacity around to cover new pinch points?)

Example ... Fare of £10 in 2021, 10 passengers paying a total of £100.00
Reduce fare to £8.60, now 12 or 13 passengers so paying a total of £102.60 or £111.40

[stuving]

The background to this was a bit different to today, though. During WW1, a sharp burst of inflation roughly doubled prices. Wages did much the same, due to the novel idea of indexation (to a rather puritanical cost of living index: no alcohol or tobacco!). After the war business owners, and Conservatives in general, thought recovery should mean wages returning to pre-war levels, and they did indeed drop sharply (though working hours also dropped). This argument about whether wages could or should go down as well as up then became much more dramatic after 1926, of course.

So before 1923 there was a lot of argument about whether prices such as railway fares should revert to, or at least towards, pre-war levels. They had been fully regulated under wartime powers, and "deregulated" in 1921 but still subject to legal controls as monopoly carriers of goods.

Obviously by then they were not in a monopoly at all - nor were they for passengers. So pricing fares now could be discussed as a matter of competition with buses - but it rarely was, for some reason. Maybe the world divided into those who relied on railways, and for whom buses were irrelevant, and those who had switched to bus and road transport, who could see little future for railways.

One similarity with today is that the railways were losing money and whatever they did was judged primarily on whether it would reduce losses. We know now that they would soon be faced with deflation and depression; what they face now may be rather different.